If you want to lunch with Lucien or dine with Damian (Freud and Hirst respectively), then Mount Street Restaurant might be the place for you. Rumour has it that £50m worth of art hang on its walls. If only the kitchen produced food that was sufficiently exulted to match the quality of the paintings. Mount Street might look impressive, but the food felt to us like posh pub grub – at Mayfair prices.
It’s hard to fault the dining room at Mount Street. Situated on the first floor above The Audley (ironically, a pub) with the artwork loaned by a nearby gallery, guests get to gush at Gormley and praise Picasso over their grouse or pie – both on the menu when we visited. It is a wonderfully light-filled space with no bad tables. Our corner spot provided ample scope for people watching and art admiration. Multiple servers were on hand to attend every need. If anything, Mount Street veered towards the over-officious. Conversation was interrupted on several occasions by yet another server checking that everything was to our satisfaction.
British classics interpreted for a modern audience, combined with a bit of old-fashioned comfort food seem to be the culinary angles Mount Street is going for. The likes of omelette Arnold Bennett and Coronation Chicken salad (invented in the 1920s and 1950s respectively) appear on the menu. So does the Victorian classic, the mock turtle. At Mount Street, it is transformed from a soup into a croquette. There is little for those with small appetites, or those dining out on a budget. Case in point: a chilled tomato soup – admittedly served with a toasted focaccia and garlic butter – would set a guest back £22.
Dining started promisingly with gratis bread. It was accompanied by a decadent and flavoursome chicken liver pate. This was arguably the best item we consumed. Our friendly server recommended the mock turtle (veal in actuality) croquette as well as the Orkney scallop scampi to begin followed by their apparently classic ‘lobster pie for two’ as a main. We acquiesced. Everything was presented beautifully, with flourish and verve. The contents, however, were little more than average. Neither starter could be faulted, but nor did they wow. The lobster pie was an undoubted talking point – see the above picture. It did not taste quite as good as it looked. A rich and overpowering dish for sure, but too much for a working lunch. At least the complementary greens served as an appropriate foil.
We stuck to water although a brief perusal of the wine list suggests that Mount Street has a range designed to impress. Whether an evening visit will ensue, however, remains to be seen.